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A common misconception when thinking about those below the level of the elite is that the majority were completely illiterate, with no reading or writing ability whatsoever. Many of those at the centre of Middling Culture were indeed literate, though the extent and nature of their literacy varied. It’s a complex issue, as people learnt to read before writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so just because someone leaves no trace of writing (e.g. a signature) does not mean that they could not read. Equally, “illiteracy” would not preclude a person from reciting a well-known story, recognising an image including Biblical figures, or understanding a street sign or coat of arms (Tara Hamling is going to address visual literacy in a future post). Literacy mattered to people: for instance, an abused apprentice in Bristol was ordered in 1621 to be sent to school ‘for the space of five yeeres together to learne to write & read Englishe’–demonstrating that not giving a middling child apprenticed to a trade a chance at schooling could be considered a form of mistreatment.[1]

It is, however, very difficult to know exactly how many people had some form of literacy, with David Cressy’s signature-counting study being the most extensive exploration of ability to write in early modern England. Cressy found a clear upward trajectory in terms of the number of people able to sign their name in witness statements.[2] It is very hard to understand the scale of literacy during the period and to properly assess where people fell on it: someone who could read the Lord’s Prayer and recognise the letters of an alphabet would have a very different kind of literacy to someone who could draw up a simple account, note, or basic will, and they, in turn, possess a different kind of literacy to someone like Shakespeare. Yet all of these people might be of a similar social status. Access to some means of learning to read and write from a parent, school, acquaintance, or at church, would be essential to a person’s literacy, and during the late sixteenth century new free schools and grammar schools were set up to facilitate a growing drive for reading and writing. Many of the boys which came through these schools would go on to occupy trades, hold positions of office, and maybe even become clerks or other kinds of administrators for corporations or parish churches and then create the records we use for our research.[3]

When we think of Shakespeare, therefore, his literacy has to be seen in the context of his family – his father, John, who rose through the ranks of the Stratford Corporation and became wealthy, but who left no trace of an ability to write, and his mother, who was from a wealthy farming family.[4] John Shakespeare clearly reaped the benefits of legal knowledge thanks to his positions of office, and the family had the wealth to allow William the time to go to school and learn to read and write to a high level. In fact, for many tradespeople an ability to read and write was beneficial to their business, from accounting to buying books that inspired aesthetic choices in performances of craft. As such, it is unsurprising that many people of Shakespeare’s status display a range of literate practices in their work or in the documents they leave behind. An example from one of our case study areas, Bristol, is the inventory of William Gethen, composed on the 7th June 1597. He self-authors an inventory of his belongings kept in two chests within the widow’s house he is lodging in, declaring that it is ‘p[er] me William Gethen his in[c]ke’ before leaving Bristol to go on an adventure with one Thomas Vaure. Although he does not state his occupation, he is probably a middling merchant, and many of his belongings are items he has gathered from various places, including a Flemish chest full of ‘writings’. In writing his own inventory in preparation for sailing, Gethen demonstrates the means to which an individual might put their literacy.[5] Contemporary culture, particularly in looking to the past, often engenders a Two Cultures mind set between those engaged in reading and writing and those who occupying practical pursuits. In reality, these divisions do not play out in practice, and they can prevent our appreciation of the ways skill, knowledge, craft, and literacy interact across many fields.

To give an example of a family who display various kinds of literacy and who are of middling status, making their money through the craft of joinery-work, let’s take a trip to seventeenth-century Salisbury to meet the Beckhams.

John and Humphrey are the two eldest brothers in the Beckham family and those who appear most frequently in the records. They grew up on the east side of Catherine Street in the parish of St. Thomas in a large house complete with warehouses with their joiner father Raynold, mother Mary, five brothers and three sisters (ten children in all). In the decades and centuries after his death, Humphrey became quite a famous joiner, with chairs attributed to his workshop by their carved crests. Accounts of his life, however, often describe him as illiterate:

Beckham’s learning reached no further than being able to read the Testament or Psalms, so that want of money added to other circumstances precluded him from all improvement [instead he spent his youth] gazing at the Statue of Henry III in a niche over the Arch of the close gate. ‘Tis very extraordinary what an impression this statue made on Beckham’s mind, he contemplated it from his infancy, and formed his works to that model as nearly as possible.[6]

This 1777 antiquarian account gives the sense that Beckham had no time for reading and writing because he was needed to aid his family’s financial situation and, anyway, he was too busy becoming an extraordinary joiner. But it is worth pausing to ask just how illiterate was Humphrey? After all, he is most famous for a spectacular carved panel in St Thomas’ church which displays Old Testament narratives in great detail.

The written record of the family clearly contests the antiquarian sources about the Beckhams’ literacy level and, as a family, they really were not very poor (though also not very rich), with Humphrey’s inventoried wealth equalling almost £190 at the time of his death (at the good age of 83). There was also a free school right round the corner from the Beckham household situated in The George Inn. It operated from 1590-1624, perfectly timed for Humphrey and his brothers’ schooling.[7] Furthermore, Humphrey and his youngest brother Benjamin were literate enough to appraise John’s inventory in 1645, and Humphrey also witnessed the will of John Young, another Salisbury joiner, in 1618, and on both documents he was able to fully sign his name.[8] Humphrey’s inventory also mentions that he owned ‘books’ to the value of 5s, a desk, and a coffer: a clear indication that he read and also conducted some writing at home.[9]

Humphrey’s writing practices might also be hinted at in a note made in St Thomas’ Church vestry minutes, which record how, on 14th January 1660:

Although it is not clear here whether Humphrey is the author of this note, from his clear signatures and presence of a desk in his home, it seems he would have likely been capable of writing it. As such, Humphrey’s literacy allows him to use writing for practical means – in this case to create a memoranda so that the church vestry pay him for work completed.

John Beckham’s Will

John Beckham’s will of 1645 offers a powerful case study to conclude this exploration of seventeenth-century Salisbury’s middling artisans and literacy. John was the eldest Beckham brother, and his original will is signed by his brothers William and Benjamin as well as himself. It is idiosyncratically written, with minimal preamble (‘I John Beckham dooe make my laste will and testament I bequeath my soule in to the handes of the allmightie ^god my maker^ and my body to the earth’) followed by a list of bequests, complete with lots of crossings out and additions. [11] The ink is unevenly distributed across the page and content gets closer together the less space there is to write, suggesting someone not all that practised at writing a will. Although the scribe might not have been John, Benjamin or William, from their signatures it seems they all would have had the literacy to write this kind of will. The inventory, taken by Humphrey and Benjamin, is in the same hand as the will, perhaps narrowing the scribe down to Benjamin, who appears on both documents, but it does not necessarily mean that Humphrey could not have written it too. If one of the Beckham brothers did write this will, however, it gives us an insight into the uses literacy could be put to at a middling level – to create legal records and a written legacy of the goods and chattels of an individual.

The Beckhams’ Cultural Awareness

Beyond Humphrey Beckham’s panel, which demonstrates acute awareness of Biblical narratives and printed iconography, Benjamin, the youngest brother, also seems to show an interest in a wider textual world. Benjamin bequeaths to his tenant, one William Spencer: ‘one picture of Mary Magdalen one picture of King James one picture of King Charles and one booke which he shall make choise’.[12] These bequests give an insight into the historical interests of Benjamin, with his portraits of past Kings and devotional imagery in the form of an image of Mary Magdalen within his house. Perhaps these interests were shared by his family, to whom he remained close to throughout his life, as illustrated by the brothers’ bequests to one another, witnessing of legal documents and provision of sureties for each others’ debts.

When assessing what it means to be “literate” among early modern England’s middling sort, it is easy to be swayed by arguments about artisans not learning to read and write, being so dedicated to their craft. But, from the example of the Beckhams, and indeed Shakespeare, it is clear that this was not always the case. With the number of schools rising in urban areas, it boys in towns would have likely been able to access education if their parents could spare children from the family’s means of financial production. Equally, not being literate, in the sense of being unable to read and write, did not mean that people would not have been deeply engaged in pervasive networks of literacy, able to recite stories, recognise images from popular texts, or sing ballads or rhymes.

[2] David Cressy, ‘Levels of Illiteracy in England, 1530-1730’, The Historical Journal, 20:1 (1977) and Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

[3] A particularly well-documented school is Shakespeare’s school in Stratford-Upon-Avon. See: Ian Green, “More Polite Learning”: Humanism and the New Grammar School’, in The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford (Ashgate, 2012), pp.73-97.

In Rubbish Theory, Michael Thompson argues that there are three kinds of value categories: ‘transient’ or ‘here today, gone tomorrow’; ‘durable’ or ‘a joy forever’; and rubbish. Things can move between categories, with a bottle thrown away at its time of use becoming a collectable or a ring that slipped from the finger five hundred years ago ending up on the Portable Antiquities Scheme and revalued.[1] Mudlarking, when the term was first in use, was used to describe those who scavenged for valuable goods in rivers and sewers, sifting through rubbish for a lump of coal or dropped coin.[2] Since our trip with the Thames Discovery Programme, I’ve been thinking a lot about fragments and waste – what do we do with them? What do they tell us about middling culture?

Image Two: Items lost and found.

Mudlarking finds that make the news are those, we realised, that are both hard to find for the untrained eye and rare compared to the vast quantities of glass, pottery shards, single-use plastic and bones that litter the foreshore.[3] What we found was an abundance of fragments. Little pieces of clay pipe, bottle necks, terracotta pipe pieces and cow teeth. The waste of London: building debris and stuff that had washed down to the river from layers of construction work. These pieces were very had to judge: how old were they? What object did they form part of? Where are they from? All of these questions we largely saved until the end, going by our individual eye for colour and shape, with most of us ending up with a homogeneous selection of fragments we judged to be old or pretty.

These fragments are, in many ways, a useful way of thinking about evidence in archives as well as in archaeology, museums and collections, and the way in which it is coming together in this project to narrate hidden histories. Often, we might only have a small quantity of information about a person or object: a record of a parish clerk and his activities in the churchwardens’ accounts, but no will, inventory, baptism or marriage record; houses destroyed in war, renovation or fire; objects without a clear idea of where they come from. It’s the threading of a multitude of material and textual fragments together, which build a sense of cultural lives. So this trip taught us to look more closely at the broken things, those pieces of objects that might have formed part of a middling person’s tableware, like the olive-green glazed borderware pieces we found in abundance.

These small pottery fragments, when found in such plenty, also point to a hidden archive of things that were not necessarily treasured for long, and which had a lifetime dictated by their fragility or style. These ceramic and glass fragments reveal an archive of broken things that are not often recorded and are part of the everyday, non-expensive but also indispensable, objects that appear in-use in recipes or literature. The items we uncovered are those we most frequently overlook. Some things, as Michael Thompson argues, are ‘transient’; they are bought for a particular purpose, then disposed of, break or decay. Yet, when we pick up these pieces of pottery, we start to revalue them as important to understanding past activities.

Another aspect of material culture the Thames foreshore confronted us with was dispossessed objects. What do you do with something that cannot be traced to a specific place, person or even an object? There were so many layers of broken things that had been washed up, and a great swathe were still being washed down river. Where did they come from? Did they come from a dump, from a commercial context like a potter or butcher, or from someone’s home? Does this change how we might read them as deposits? One of the beautiful things about mudlarking is that the river dictates the travel of fragments downstream, depositing by the weight of the materials, so doing its own sorting. As such, it was difficult to read the journeys of the things we picked up, with fragments of pipes seeming as alien as bits of delftware. In many ways, a lot of research is an exercise in re-homing the displaced: thinking about the original composition of a rebound manuscript in an archive, placing a letter alongside a portrait, or imagining a silver spoon in someone’s hand. The foreshore presents a challenge in judgment when thinking about provenance because there is just so much, and every piece could be read as a valuable fragment of evidence for craft practices, industry, tools and use, aesthetic taste, or leisure activities.

The river’s waste is fascinatingly revalued through mudlarking, and some items are lifted out of obscurity and carefully recorded. But another thing about these fragments is their geographical particularity. All of the rivers’ deposits have arrived into, been consumed or dumped within the Thames. Although this is a very large area, it struck me how mudlarking often seems to be a London-focused activity. It would be fascinating to know of people doing similar activities elsewhere in the UK, and to know how deposits in the Thames compare to other rivers. This experience has been an invaluable exercise in thinking about fragments and their implications, methodologically and practically, and also how they relate to middling lives, where individuals and objects might appear dispersed across documents, spaces and things.

This exploration of early modern skill in handwriting comes from Hannah Lilley, who joins the project as a Postdoctoral Research Associate this month and is based at the University of Birmingham.

My
first post for this blog approaches one of the project’s keywords: skill. This
term, and how to interpret it, is something I’ve been thinking about over the
course of my PhD on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scribes writing for a
living and their material, spatial and social practices. Although skill can be
read into any number of activities, I’m going to focus on writing, specifically
handwriting. Literacy ‘as learned and embodied skill, and as a site of cultural
connection’ has already been established in a previous post as a ‘mark of middling
status’, alongside other activities. Knowing how to write could lead to gaining
office and entry into administrative roles, and many of those middling sorts
emerging for this project are those with the literacy to participate in record
creation (though this could be artisanal, in the form of craft and the material
record, as well as textually…).

What is it?

The
OED defines skill in multiple ways,
including: ‘to have discrimination or knowledge […] in a specified matter’ (5a)
and to possess ‘capability of accomplishing something with precision and
certainty; practical knowledge in combination with ability; cleverness,
expertness. Also an ability to perform a function, acquired or learnt with
practice’ (6a).[1]
These definitions establish skill as a term that can be applied to any number
of activities: from baking to walking to storytelling to shopping. What is
clear is that skill is usually applied positively to denote someone who has
spent time learning, honing and practising an activity to develop the
‘discrimination’ or ‘knowledge’ to be perceived as holding expertise. Outside
perception and judgement is essential to an understanding of a person as
skilled, and this could take place in a commercial transaction – when
commissioning work or buying a product, for example – or through sharing space
with a person performing a task.

Speaking Skill

There
are, however, multiple methodological issues when it comes to discussing skill.
For example:

Skill
is expressed through action and so it might be difficult for the actor to
verbalise how they do a task/ it does not need to be passed on in writing or
through speech.[2]

Skill’s
definition rests on those perceiving the result of an action as practised and,
as such, is subjective and dependent on multiple factors such as: age, gender,
geographical location, education, and purpose. Skill is also entwined with
moral, political and economic value judgements.

Environmental
factors could play a role in its development/ expression: access to materials,
spaces, and social networks.

Handwriting

When
thinking about these issues and handwriting, then, here are a few questions (of
many) that come up, and I’m going to think about a couple of them later in this
post:

How is skill individual and how is it
social?

How might it be local or national?

What role does gender or social status
have on perception of handwriting skill?/ Can we describe a skill as being
‘middling’?

How does it develop within different
spaces (workshops, homes, classrooms etc.)?

How might perceptions of practical skill
be entwined with abstract concepts?

How can practice be interpreted?

Interpreting Practice Using Image
Processing

One of the methods I’ve been using to explore questions around individual and social skill in handwriting is a digital approach called Image Processing, alongside a digital forensic handwriting analysis expert Dr Richard Guest. Although this is preliminary research with regards to using Image Processing to analyse sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handwriting practices, it does show promise as a means of exploring similarities and differences between demographic groups of scribes as well as between individuals. I used letterforms as a means of comparison (imperfect, but a good way of seeing whether the method works before moving onto full words) and some interesting interpretations of handwriting practice came out of the data.

To
give a brief example, one of the experiments was on clerks working in the
Kentish town of Lydd 1560-1640. I looked at how their handwriting practices
changed over the period and thought about how this relates to changing
perceptions of what constitutes handwriting skill in the town at this time. The
examples below are from some of the simpler measurements applied to the
letterforms – area and perimeter – and the charts show both the median and mean
results.

Charts
One to Four are brief examples showing a clear change in handwriting practices
in Lydd across the period, with the majuscules for the earliest three clerks
having mean and median values that far exceed the measurements for the later
three clerks, meaning that the three earlier clerks are using much larger
letterforms. This demonstrates a change in attitude towards letterform size
over the late sixteenth into the early seventeenth century and is one example
of how we might think about practical skill as being social. Collectively, the clerks in Lydd show a trend towards
smaller letterforms. Furthermore, these clerks are all of middling status,
literate and play an important role in their corporation. Skill at writing has
enabled them to become part of their community’s record creation. There is more
to be done here, and more in my recently completed thesis – but this is just a
glimpse into how a digital method can be used to approach non-verbalised
practical skill.

Moralising Handwriting Skill

The
aesthetic expectations for handwriting during this period included: script
style appropriate to document type, purpose, or context, and this is one of the
ways in which we might understand what scribes thought constituted skill at
writing during this period. For example, mastery of chancery hand was essential
for clerks working at the chancery court. Beyond this, there were plenty of
printed prescriptive texts circulating during the late sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, extolling the importance of fair handwriting and good
practice. Although these present problems with regards to gaining insight into
actual scribal practices because they are prescriptive texts, they do give
information about how handwriting skill was connected to positive individual
qualities.

Image 1. John De Beauchasne and John Baildon, A Booke Containing Diverse Sorts of Hands (1571). Italic hand example. Text: It is the part of a yonge man to reuerence his elders, and of suche/ to choose out the beste and moste commended whose counsayle/ and auctoritie hee maye leane vnto: For the vnskilfulnesse of/ tender yeares myst by old mens experience be ordered & gouern.

Although
there are many examples of this in printed handwriting texts, the example in
Image 1 is from John De Beauchasne’s and John Baildon’s A Booke Containing Diverse Sorts of Hands. Here, the handwriting
exemplar for the starting-out scribe carries a moral message about revering and
respecting elders and being governed by their experience. Due to the audience
for this text likely being students at home or in the grammar school, the
message for the ‘yonge man’ is pertinent. Furthermore, there is an example of a
young middling scribe using this text to learn to write in Ann Bowyer, Elias
Ashmole’s mother, whose commonplace book (Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 51)
includes exercises drawn from this text. Consequently, good handwriting
practice would also likely involve close attention to moral sentiments,
connecting skill at writing to good character (something which instructional texts
– such as Peter Bales’, The Writing
Scholemaster – do very explicitly).

As
such, for literate middling sorts of scribes, who would have likely gained
their initial education in literacy at grammar school, at home, and at church,
mastering scripts would have been important not only to their future employment
but also to the way in which they may have been perceived by their social
network. An example of this is can be seen in the chamberlain’s accounts for
Lydd, where the town clerk until 1574, John Heblethwaite, scribes the accounts
because the chamberlains are ‘unlearned’. He goes on to state in his will that
he has written it ‘with my owne hand welleknowne’ demonstrating how important
his handwriting becomes to his social standing – it leaves a recognisable mark.[3]

Writing
not only rested on forming words in a legible and aesthetically appropriate
manner and learning standard formats for documents, but also involved the
mastery of the tools and materials of writing including cutting a quill fit for
the hand, making ink or sourcing some of good quality to buy, and choosing
paper. All of these processes generated a certain perception of both the
document and its scribe.[4] The material knowledge
displayed by scribes is also artisanal expertise; it rests upon a relationship
between the equipment used in writing and the scribes’ repeated practice with
it in order to gain writing skill.

By
way of concluding this post, then, skill might be thought of as involving the
dialogue between a person, materials and their social world. As these brief
examples show, practice was entwined with the social world in which it was
embedded, where it was entwined with the collective activities of proximate
scribes and their moral, as well as practical, education.

[2] For useful reflections on this
point/ further reading see: John Sutton and Nicholas Keene, ‘Cognitive History
and Material Culture’, The Routledge
Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Catherine
Richardson, Tara Hamling and David Gaimster (Oxford: Routledge, 2017), Michael
Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004), and Tim Ingold, Making:
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013).

The growth of a sector of society that was more educated and prosperous than the ‘plebs’ or ‘meaner sort’ but which lacked the established wealth and pedigree of the gentlemen or exalted members of the aristocracy was one of the distinguishing features of early modern English society. The ‘middling sort’ encompassed a diverse range of people, including ‘yeoman and husbandmen farmers and artisans’ and those who worked in business or the professions.[1]